THE COOPERATIVE PARENTS
"I wonder how a place like this apartment will look to her," Beulah
said thoughtfully. "I wonder if it will seem elegant, or cramped to
death. I wonder if she will take to it kindly, or with an ill
concealed contempt for its limitations."
"The poor little thing will probably be so frightened and homesick by
the time David gets her here, that she won't know what kind of a place
she's arrived at," Gertrude suggested. "Oh, I wouldn't be in your
shoes for the next few days for anything in the world, Beulah Page;
would you, Margaret?"
The third girl in the group smiled.
"I don't know," she said thoughtfully. "It would be rather fun to
begin it."
"I'd rather have her for the first two months, and get it over with,"
Beulah said decisively. "It'll be hanging over your head long after my
ordeal is over, and by the time I have to have her again she'll be
absolutely in training. You don't come until the fifth on the list you
know, Gertrude. Jimmie has her after me, then Margaret, then Peter,
and you, and David, if he has got up the courage to tell his mother
by that time."
"But if he hasn't," Gertrude suggested.
"He can work it out for himself. He's got to take the child two months
like the rest of us. He's agreed to."
"He will," Margaret said, "I've never known him to go back on his word
yet."
"Trust Margaret to stick up for David. Anyway, I've taken the
precaution to put it in writing, as you know, and the document is
filed."
"We're not adopting this infant legally."
"No, Gertrude, we can't,--yet, but morally we are. She isn't an
infant, she's ten years old. I wish you girls would take the matter a
little more seriously. We've bound ourselves to be responsible for
this child's whole future. We have undertaken her moral, social and
religious education. Her body and soul are to be--"
"Equally divided among us," Gertrude cut in.
Beulah scorned the interruption.
"--held sacredly in trust by the six of us, severally and
collectively."
"Why haven't we adopted her legally then?" Margaret asked.
"Well, you see, there are practical objections. You have to be a
corporation or an institution or something, to adopt a child as a
group. A child can't have three sets of parents in the eyes of the
law, especially when none of them is married, or have the least
intention of being married, to each other.--I don't see what you want
to keep laughing at, Gertrude. It's all a little unusual and modern
and that sort of thing, but I don't think it's funny. Do you,
Margaret?"
"I think that it's funny, but I think that it's serious, too,
Beulah."
"I don't see what's funny about--" Beulah began hotly.
"You don't see what's funny about anything,--even Rogers College, do
you, darling? It is funny though for the bunch of us to undertake the
upbringing of a child ten years old; to make ourselves financially and
spiritually responsible for it. It's a lot more than funny, I know,
but it doesn't seem to me as if I could go on with it at all, until
somebody was willing to admit what a _scream_ the whole thing is."
"We'll admit that, if that's all you want, won't we, Beulah?" Margaret
appealed.
"If I've got this insatiable sense of humor, let's indulge it by all
means," Gertrude laughed. "Go on, chillun, go on, I'll try to be good
now."
"I wish you would," Margaret said. "Confine yourself to a syncopated
chortle while I get a few facts out of Beulah. I did most of my voting
on this proposition by proxy, while I was having the measles in
quarantine. Beulah, did I understand you to say you got hold of your
victim through Mrs. O'Farrel, your seamstress?"
"Yes, when we decided we'd do this, we thought we'd get a child about
six. We couldn't have her any younger, because there would be bottles,
and expert feeding, and well, you know, all those things. We couldn't
have done it, especially the boys. We thought six would be just about
the right age, but we simply couldn't find a child that would do. We
had to know about its antecedents. We looked through the orphan
asylums, but there wasn't anything pure-blooded American that we could
be sure of. We were all agreed that we wanted pure American blood. I
knew Mrs. O'Farrel had relatives on Cape Cod. You know what that stock
is, a good sea-faring strain, and a race of wonderfully fine women,
'atavistic aristocrats' I remember an author in the _Atlantic Monthly_
called them once. I suppose you think it's funny to groan, Gertrude,
when anybody makes a literary allusion, but it isn't. Well, anyway,
Mrs. O'Farrel knew about this child, and sent for her. She stayed with
Mrs. O'Farrel over Sunday, and now David is bringing her here. She'll
be here in a minute."
"Why David?" Gertrude twinkled.
"Why not David?" Beulah retorted. "It will be a good experience for
him, besides David is so amusing when he tries to be, I thought he
could divert her on the way."
"It isn't such a crazy idea, after all, Gertrude." Margaret Hutchinson
was the youngest of the three, being within several months of her
majority, but she looked older. Her face had that look of wisdom that
comes to the young who have suffered physical pain. "We've got to do
something. We're all too full of energy and spirits, at least the rest
of you are, and I'm getting huskier every minute, to twirl our hands
and do nothing. None of us ever wants to be married,--that's settled;
but we do want to be useful. We're a united group of the closest kind
of friends, bound by the ties of--of--natural selection, and we need a
purpose in life. Gertrude's a real artist, but the rest of us are not,
and--and--"
"What could be more natural for us than to want the living clay to
work on? That's the idea, isn't it?" Gertrude said. "I can be serious
if I want to, Beulah-land, but, honestly, girls, when I come to face
out the proposition, I'm almost afraid to. What'll I do with that
child when it comes to be my turn? What'll Jimmie do? Buy her a string
of pearls, and show her the night life of New York very likely. How'll
I break it to my mother? That's the cheerful little echo in my
thoughts night and day. How did you break it to yours, Beulah?"
Beulah flushed. Her serious brown eyes, deep brown with wine-colored
lights in them, met those of each of her friends in turn. Then she
laughed.
"Well, I do know this is funny," she said, "but, you know, I haven't
dared tell her. She'll be away for a month, anyway. Aunt Ann is here,
but I'm only telling her that I'm having a little girl from the
country to visit me."
Occasionally the architect of an apartment on the upper west side of
New York--by pure accident, it would seem, since the general run of
such apartments is so uncomfortable, and unfriendly--hits upon a plan
for a group of rooms that are at once graciously proportioned and
charmingly convenient, while not being an absolute offense to the eye
in respect to the details of their decoration. Beulah Page and her
mother lived in such an apartment, and they had managed with a few
ancestral household gods, and a good many carefully related modern
additions to them, to make of their eight rooms and bath, to say
nothing of the ubiquitous butler's-pantry, something very remarkably
resembling a home, in its most delightful connotation: and it was in
the drawing room of this home that the three girls were gathered.
Beulah, the younger daughter of a widowed mother--now visiting in the
home of the elder daughter, Beulah's sister Agatha, in the expectation
of what the Victorians refer to as an "interesting event"--was
technically under the chaperonage of her Aunt Ann, a solemn little
spinster with no control whatever over the movements of her determined
young niece.
Beulah was just out of college,--just out, in fact, of the most
high-minded of all the colleges for women;--that founded by Andrew
Rogers in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-one. There
is probably a greater percentage of purposeful young women graduated
from Rogers College every year, than from any other one of the
communities of learning devoted to the education of women; and of all
the purposeful classes turned out from that admirable institution,
Beulah's class could without exaggeration be designated as the most
purposeful class of them all. That Beulah was not the most purposeful
member of her class merely argues that an almost abnormally high
standard of purposefulness was maintained by practically every
individual in it.
At Rogers every graduating class has its fad; its propaganda for a
crusade against the most startling evils of the world. One year, the
sacred outlines of the human figure are protected against
disfigurement by an ardent group of young classicists in Grecian
draperies. The next, a fierce young brood of vegetarians challenge a
lethargic world to mortal combat over an Argentine sirloin. The year
of Beulah's graduation, the new theories of child culture that were
gaining serious headway in academic circles, had filtered into the
class rooms, and Beulah's mates had contracted the contagion
instantly. The entire senior class went mad on the subject of child
psychology and the various scientific prescriptions for the direction
of the young idea.
It was therefore primarily to Beulah Page, that little Eleanor Hamlin,
of Colhassett, Massachusetts, owed the change in her fortune. At least
it was to Beulah that she owed the initial inspiration that set the
wheel of that fortune in motion; but it was to the glorious enterprise
and idealism of youth, and the courage of a set of the most intrepid
and quixotic convictions that ever quickened in the breasts of a mad
half dozen youngsters, that she owed the actual fulfillment of her
adventure.
The sound of the door-bell brought the three girls to their feet, but
the footfalls in the corridor, double quick time, and accentuated,
announced merely the arrival of Jimmie Sears, and Peter Stuyvesant,
nicknamed _Gramercy_ by common consent.
"Has she come?" Peter asked.
But Jimmie struck an attitude in the middle of the floor.
"My daughter, oh! my daughter," he cried. "This suspense is killing
me. For the love of Mike, children, where is she?"
"She's coming," Beulah answered; "David's bringing her."
Gertrude pushed him into the _chaise-lounge_ already in the
possession of Margaret, and squeezed in between them.
"Hold my hand, Jimmie," she said. "The feelings of a father are
nothing,--_nothing_ in comparison to those which smolder in the
maternal breast. Look at Beulah, how white she is, and Margaret is
trembling this minute."
"I'm trembling, too," Peter said, "or if I'm not trembling, I'm
frightened."
"We're all frightened," Margaret said, "but we're game."
The door-bell rang again.
"There they come," Beulah said, "oh! everybody be good to me."
The familiar figure of their good friend David appeared on the
threshold at this instant, and beside him an odd-looking little figure
in a shoddy cloth coat, and a faded blue tam-o'-shanter. There was a
long smudge of dirt reaching from the corner of her eye well down into
the middle of her cheek. A kind of composite gasp went up from the
waiting group, a gasp of surprise, consternation, and panic. Not one
of the five could have told at that instant what it was he expected to
see, or how his imagination of the child differed from the concrete
reality, but amazement and keen disappointment constrained them. Here
was no figure of romance and delight. No miniature Galatea half hewn
out of the block of humanity, waiting for the chisel of a composite
Pygmalion. Here was only a grubby, little unkempt child, like all
other children, but not so presentable.
"What's the matter with everybody?" said David with unnatural
sharpness. "I want to present you to our ward, Miss Eleanor Hamlin,
who has come a long way for the pleasure of meeting you. Eleanor,
these are your cooperative parents."
The child's set gaze followed his gesture obediently. David took the
little hand in his, and led the owner into the heart of the group.
Beulah stepped forward.
"This is your Aunt Beulah, Eleanor, of whom I've been telling you."
"I'm pleased to make your acquaintance, Aunt Beulah," the little girl
said, as Beulah put out her hand, still uncertainly.
Then the five saw a strange thing happen. The immaculate, inscrutable
David--the aristocrat of aristocrats, the one undemonstrative,
super-self-conscious member of the crowd, who had been delegated to
transport the little orphan chiefly because the errand was so
incongruous a mission on which to despatch him--David put his arm
around the neck of the child with a quick protecting gesture, and then
gathered her close in his arms, where she clung, quivering and
sobbing, the unkempt curls straggling helplessly over his shoulder.
He strode across the room where Margaret was still sitting upright in
the _chaise-lounge_, her dove-gray eyes wide, her lips parted.
"Here, you take her," he said, without ceremony, and slipped his
burden into her arms.
"Welcome to our city, Kiddo," Jimmie said in his throat, but nobody
heard him.
Peter, whose habit it was to walk up and down endlessly wherever he
felt most at home, paused in his peregrination, as Margaret shyly
gathered the rough little head to her bosom. The child met his gaze as
he did so.
"We weren't quite up to scratch," he said gravely.
Beulah's eyes filled. "Peter," she said, "Peter, I didn't mean to
be--not to be--"
But Peter seemed not to know she was speaking. The child's eyes still
held him, and he stood gazing down at her, his handsome head thrown
slightly back; his face deeply intent; his eyes softened.
"I'm your Uncle Peter, Eleanor," he said, and bent down till his lips
touched her forehead.